Yahoo! Kickstart was a professional network created by Yahoo! for college students, recent graduates, employers and alumni.^[1] The service was similar to LinkedIn, initially aimed at connecting students and alumni of the same university professionally, with recruiters joining later in the network's inception. Yahoo! offered a $25,000 prize to whichever college or university that got the greatest number of alumni to sign up before December 31, 2007.^[1] Kickstart's "Preview" (beta) was launched on November 5, 2007 by Yahoo!'s Advanced Products team, based in San Francisco. Yahoo closed down the network in 2008, amidst reports of server downtime and error messages.^[2] Users were redirected to Yahoo! HotJobs as an alternative for jobseekers.